Your website is really there for a reason –the raison d’etre might be selling products as an e-commerce. selling professional services by generating leads, or otherwise for a home base blogger , the website shares wonderful knowledge and experience. Be it one or the other- you have a chance for growth and using your website to the fullest can reveal hidden opportunities you never saw were there. Knowledge about – your website-, business goals, your potential customers, audience or your competitors is really knowledge of your business from all possible angles. It’s a 360 degree view that can generate a goldmine of insights and trigger new spikes in sales.

The market offers a range of tools, particularly designed to analyze data in each of these four areas. Some are highly sophisticated, expensive, complicated to implement while the others are free but at the same time not effective enough. Neither of these do really meet needs of our highly conscience, value seeking, and budding business class audience and therefore have no place in this post. We are really talking about best of both worlds. Robust, feature rich, smart tools available at zero to little cost.

About Your Website-This bare basic information about your website. It talks about your website but it’s also important for other analysis .What are the most popular pages, and which ones have the highest exits/bounces. What turns your visitor off and never gets him engaged to what appeals to him . How many new visitors to your website and what portion of that traffic leaves from landing page. Some free tools offering this information are – Google Analytics, Yahoo-web analytics, Xiti, Piwik, AWStats etc.

About the Business Goals your Website Achieve– Your website is important because it is tied to your business- 100%. It inherits your business plans, targets and goals . Like your real business, it’s critical you measure rate of success for your website too. Most of the clickstream tools can also measure multiple goals, goal sets and extent of success in each. So namely these are Google Analytics, Yahoo-web analytics, Feedburner, 4Q by iPerceptions

About your Audience and Potential Customers– Reading the minds of customer is one the most daunting tasks ever known to marketers. Many god send great marketers, were believed to have that uncanny power, but what about others? Do they get washed down, No. they have customers walk up to them and disclose all that they like or prefer. Yes that’s possible! Website experimentation, A/B split test, Multivariate test quantify the voice of customers. Some great tools are Optimizely, Google Content Experimentation, SiteSpect, Forsee etc.

About Your Competitors– Sitting in the driver’s seat with the window panes painted black, you will know little about the surround. Remove the opaque coat and d now see- you might find yourself ahead of others, that’s great, but you might as well be lagging miles behind the rest . Think of it and most of your strategic decisions are guided by the competition – ones you want to overthrow or avoid. And high chance your website is also competing against the same set of competitors in the cyber space. Know about clicks, keywords, value of customer engagements , relative to your competition. Google Display Planner, Google Trend , Compete, HitWise etc.

In our last article we tried typical pain points, queries and confusions of business owners who are unable to use the data readily available for their website. The above list is our solution. Try them out at minimum risk and experience the power of an all rounded information about your business and put them in action.

Look forward to my next post for a detailed pros – cons Analysis and comparison of each tool with others in the category.

From the moment a visitor clicks on your website to the point the visitor leaves and sometimes even beyond that, every moment is being tracked. Understandably, that means generation and collection of a massive amount of data for businesses made possible by cutting edge tools and technology. However what to do with that data has always been a daunting question. Do you really have access to the information and insights it stores. Did your vendors or web analytics team actually unearthered hidden opportunities. Or better, do you have one in the first place. Our interaction with businesses, corporates and decision makers revealed most are not using this information fully. Listed below are five common traits if you too are among them you would find yourself agreeing.

Trait #1

Your web hosting vendor provides stacks of data- that makes hardly any sense. Either they seem dumb or too overwhelming to put to use. Many questions have always remained unanswered. Yes that means losing your way in the wilderness of data and you need help.

Trait #2

You have split your expenditure on web data analytic in essentially two halves or so- that means 50% of your budget buys tools and the rest are paid to hired analyst. Before a get into how much a good analyst should be paid- let’s ruffle the criticality of having one. Your tools can collect data fully, summaries it to large extent, but interpret it minimally. While that’s really the most important , it requires a human to apply knowledge , experience analytics methodologies to really glean out the insights for your company to act on.

Trait #3

You are into adopting and owning every new tools or technical innovation hitting the market- but often have you thought – why?

Social media is the way to go, Google AdWords is the most powerful. A paid web analytics is better than a free one. The news every day provides tons of such updates. You were convinced and moved to implement tools and methods spent to create a video , launch a campaign on Facebook or Google , constructed a new high end website , but little have you know the outcome. How well is your marketing expenditure converting to increase sales or generate more lead or more traffic.

Trait #4

So what? The question that rise most often when you look at click stream data.

The paradox of data says- no data means no insights but a lot of dumb data also means no insights. Clicks, visitors, visits and seconds spent on your website- So what? What does that mean, who does it benefit and how is a business benefiting, if at all.

Trait #5

Whom are you competing with on the web- the next question on your minds? Are they the same guys you have competed with so far, or are there new competitors? What are the rules of the game on web and how to make the most of it?